Ducks Ready to Tend to Business

Teemu Selanne took the position. The goalie position.

Practice was over, long over. Most of the Mighty Ducks were showered, dressed and out of the Joe Louis Arena locker room the day after they had been shoved, punched, pushed, prodded, bruised, bloodied and beaten, but only 5-3, Wednesday by the Detroit Red Wings.

And Selanne, the NHL’s leading goal scorer this season (47), had even scored once. But mostly he was bodied up and bothered by Chris Chelios and Nicklas Lidstrom, “two of the best defenders in the league,” Selanne would say later.

If Wednesday hadn’t been a pleasant experience for Selanne, it wasn’t a disaster. If it hadn’t been a productive evening--”How many scoring chances did I have? Not many,” he said--it also hadn’t been a total loss. “Learned a lot. What? I’m not telling,” Selanne said.

But when someone went looking for Selanne Thursday afternoon in Hockeytown, which is what the Detroit Red Wings modestly call this city, he wasn’t in the locker room or walking to the bus or making plans for dinner.

Selanne was crouched low in goal, bangs drooping over his eyes, no helmet, no face mask and glaring at Johan Davidsson and Antti Aalto. Aalto put a fake on Selanne, who threw himself at the puck, which was still on Aalto’s stick. While Selanne was swimming on the ice, face down and doing a poor breaststroke, Aalto skated around and daintily lifted the puck into the net.

“You’re a bad goalie, eh,” Davidsson shouted and Selanne giggled.

For 40 minutes this went on. Selanne, Aalto and Davidsson played all sorts of games. Shooting from the blue line. Slap shots high, hard and many right over the glass. Chris Youngblood, a Joe Louis Arena employee, watched with some consternation and muttered, “Makes you wonder how any of them guys got into the league.”

Hey, pal, this was nothing but fun. Pure, exuberant, laughing out loud, shouting to the rafters, little kid fun.

Selanne tried to whack pucks high into the air and make them stick on top of the scoreboard. He’d shout “three shots each,” and then pick a spot, slide over three pucks to Aalto and Davidsson and the games would begin. When Selanne would win, of course, I mean, these were his games, he raised his arms, pumped his fists, made loud noises.

When Selanne finally was done, after Coach Craig Hartsburg had come looking for his star, rolled his eyes and said, “Get these guys off the ice,” after the locker room was empty, Selanne came off the ice and yelled “confidence builder.”

That’s something all the Ducks could use. A bit of an ego boost.

They have heard and read and maybe even thought for two weeks now about how they are no match for the Red Wings. How they are not as deep or tough or experienced. How they don’t have enough scorers or enforcers, not enough bullies, not enough of an idea.

The funny thing is, a day after getting beat in Game 1, getting manhandled some of the time, getting pushed around and beat to the puck and the punches, the Ducks are filled with some bravado and some increasing confidence.

That’s what Selanne thinks and that’s how his teammates are acting.

“Game 2 is going to be totally different,” Selanne said. And he truly believes that.

“It was our first playoff game in two years. After every shift Paul [Kariya] and I, we’d come off the ice and be saying, ‘We should do this and this and this.’

“We were learning things on every shift. Yes, the checking against us will make our game a little bit more difficult so we have to be smarter, take advantage of all our chances and be better defensively. We have to win more battles, get the puck in our end a bit more.”

Take this as an A-1 pep talk, but the Ducks will need something more.

A wandering Red Wing fan, waiting for the laggard Ducks to get on the bus and, oh yeah, sign an autograph, called the Mighty Ducks the “Ducklettes.” Downy-covered chicks too soft and too pretty and too precious to stand up to playoff roughness. Fun to watch and then fun to pound on. That seemed to be the Detroit fan’s point. Before he begged Selanne to sign a stick.

So the Ducklettes will move on to Game 2. Selanne said, absolutely that “I can play better. The team can play better.

“I think we feel better about ourselves now than we did before the first game. We are more confident now than we were before the first game. We’re gonna be better. We are.”

Is this bravado speaking? Is this the brave talk of the kid Selanne, playing games on the ice after practice? Or could it be something more? You know what? Selanne wasn’t smiling anymore when he said that. When he said, “We’re more confident now.” This is no kid talk.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com